BNC64 is a socially-balanced corpus of informal British speech extracted from the BNC demogrpaphic.

Corpus size: 1.5 million tokens (running words).

Speakers: 64 (32 men and 32 women).

Sample size for individual speakers: 6.4k - 64k.

How to cite: Brezina, V. 2013. BNC64. http://corpora.lancs.ac.uk/bnc64/ [Accessed 21 March 2019 ]. Data used in the BNC64 Search & Compare tool have been extracted from the British National Corpus, distributed by Oxford University Computing Services on behalf of the BNC Consortium. Used with permission.

Acknowledgement: The development of this tool was supported by the ESRC Centre for Corpus Approaches to Social Science, ESRC grant reference ES/K002155/1.

The project focuses on speaker age as a sociolinguistic variable and aims at providing new insights into theories of language change on community, generation, and individual levels. Research conducted as part of the project will not only further our understanding of how language develops over time, but will also add to current debates on how to conduct large-scale corpus research within sociolinguistic parameters.

Alongside new research, the project also provides teaching materials with practical applications of sociolinguistic theory in corpus contexts at the secondary-school level (A-level courses of English language) and in EFL/ESL classes.

The goals of the project summarized:

Novel research on different aspects of sociolinguistic variation in British English.

Diachronic analysis of British English over the period of 20 years (using the BNC and the new BNC2014).

Online platform for carrying out sociolinguistic analyses for researchers and teachers.